the tenancy agreement: chapter 5

2005

October

Greg dropped the needle down. Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. Fripp’s guitar was loud, majestic in the dull morning. A huge canvas was half-propped up against the wall and torn down the middle. They had taken a knife to it the night before in a drunken bacchanal, showered it with ceremonial lager and destroyed it, kicked in the frame and shredded the painting. They assured themselves it was the death of art by mass participation. Conceptually astute, it had represented the climax of a hideous night, teeming with the violence of their collaborative futility in the face of the finite world. They wanted to change something, but no one of them knew what. Call it some shit fight for their own real experience! Shared and alone! They talk in paradox! A stilted party that never got started, its guests had all been possessed within the walls, burning with the rage of meaning. Earlier in the night Tom had been cajoled drunk into demonstrating his favourite sex positions on the people in the room, not actually locking with them in communal spectator congress for hypothetical appraisal but – for informational purposes – holding them where he’d hold them and thrusting at them where he’d thrust at them, his cock left limp in its pants from the coke and looking into their six dark eyes with the palpable tension of all of those genitals that fit together. There was Joe and a female guest and Ezra’s girlfriend, a short rich girl of Jewish heritage with a small head and hair long to her buttocks. Tom had swapped clothes with her, and stretched into stockings and skirt he got her on all fours and held her hips and pushed himself against her arse and her cunt that was covered by his own Levis, and she looked back at him over her shoulder while he did it. It was missionary with Joe and cowgirl with the other girl, the coke numbing the humiliation and turning it into a bizarre kind of attentiveness, or gravity, like the whole affair was in some way a crucial experiment. The weird energy all fed into this unspoken Situationist bacchanal, which unfolded with resigned inevitability and left them spent and empty like orgasm, hoarse-voiced and sweating to Elgar. It was hard to tell if they had gone too far when they were all so fucked. Besides that: never regret revelry. Joe had painted it above the front door like scripture, like a consensual group maxim. Greg walked away from the stereo in a blue dressing gown, worn down to almost nothing in all the key places. He knocked over a half full beer can and left it spilling on the carpet.

Ezra was spread out on the sofa, which had been broken during the night. Greg had jumped on it and the weak wooden frame crunched to the floor like a haemorrhage of cheap furniture stuffing and spring parts and ripped blue fabric. It had left one seat about twelve inches lower down than the other two seats, and Ezra’s head was at that end, lower than his legs, and he was completely still apart from occasional, very slow and considered blinks. Greg looked down at him and smiled like he was going to puke, clutching a mug of tea that he couldn’t bear to bring to his lips. He wandered out of the room and Ezra rubbed his eyes as Bowie got louder. A black woman of about thirty walked into the living room, frowning at the noise and carrying a brightly painted wooden octopus. She was wearing hot pink and a skirt so short that Ezra thought he imagined the shape of her vulva. Her tits moved under her smile that broadened when she saw Ezra.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He said I could have this if I left now.”

“It’s not his room,” Ezra snapped. “I told you that last night.”

“What?”

“It’s my room.”

“Okay. Can I still keep this?”

She held up the octopus. Her name was Yaa. “As in: Yaa,” she had clarified, when she had turned up late with Joe, another someone he had met just wandering around the streets. She talked about herself incessantly, as though by doing so she would be immortalised with a self-professed celebrity status that extended all around the Lewisham area. She often slipped into doing it in the third person, but no one was sure whether this was part of a constructed vapid affect informed by tabloid culture and celebrity idolatry, some attempt at self-aggrandisement, or whether it was simple grammatical inconsistency. She had sucked Joe off on the stairs down to the back garden even though he couldn’t come, and they were well suited in that respect. They wouldn’t have felt as though enough people had seen them, really seen them, had the act occurred within the privacy of a bedroom.

“No,” said Ezra firmly, gesturing to the door with a limp flick of the hand. “Now piss off out of this house that isn’t yours.”

Yaa placed the octopus down on the table amidst the cans.

“Read it yeah,” she said to Ezra, giving him the finger. “Yaa knows you’re a motherfucker.” She turned around and left. Ezra heard the front door opening and closing.

“Fuck’s sake,” he said and rolled off the sofa.

*

Later all six of them were sitting in the living room, which hadn’t been cleaned up. Someone had bought more beers, and they sang heavenly in plain blue carrier bags, the polythene stuck to the cool condensation of the aluminium cans. They were listening to Suicide, turned up loud.

“Any complaints last night?” said Ezra.

“Of course,” said Jonathan, lighting a joint. “I stopped counting after the third. There’s not much is going to make her happy.”

“I’m starting to think she doesn’t really like us,” said Tom. “What’s her name?”

“Yasmin,” said Ezra.

“Jewish?”

Ezra nodded. He had tried to make friends with her, or at least pacify her, the day before the party. He took her bottle of wine and told her about the party and that his girlfriend was Jewish too, but she had threatened to call the police. He had sounded odd. Joe grabbed another beer from the bag.

“Great party, though,” he said.

“Yeah, great party,” snapped Greg, loudly breathing out smoke through tightly pursed lips. “Except fucking Lucas is going to give us some serious shit if she starts emailing him again. He doesn’t need it and we don’t need it. She emails him again and it’s us who gets the ball end of Lucas. He already told us: final final warning. And that was last time.”

“Fuck him, Greg. He’s just lonely,” said Joe.

“He owns the house, Joe,” said Ezra.

“It’s just a house. Who gives a shit?”

“I do,” said Tom. “I live here, all my stuff is here. We’ve got to not fuck this up.”

“I tried to remind you of that yesterday while your eyes rolled back in your head and you danced to ‘Common People’ on your now broken bed with half the fucking party.” Ezra hadn’t seen him in his girlfriend’s clothes, simulating fucking her from behind. Probably for the best.

“But that’s exactly it,” said Joe. “Fuck it. If he keeps on threatening us I’ll sort it out.”

“What are you going to do Joe? Get a fake passport for him? Sell him some coke? He’s well within his rights to kick us out already.” Ezra took a long swig on his can, a thin stream of the tepid lager trickling out the corner of his lips and down over his chin.

“I’ll sort it.”

“Don’t be a dickhead,” said Greg. “No one’s sorting out anything, least of all our fucking landlord.” Joe’s mind seemed to be wandering and he opened another beer, despite not having finished the last. Ezra shot a frown at Tom, who felt a bad taste in his mouth. “He can throw us out Joe.”

“Agreed,” said Jonathan, passing the joint to Greg and nodding at the stereo. “So shall we turn it down?”

They all smiled. Nobody moved. The music blasted onward.